Motor Cities: Coventry

Coventry was the obvious birthplace. The bicycle making capital of the world, it was also a global leader in sewing machines, and both clock and watch making. These precision engineering skills were easily transferrable to car design and construction. And, as Coventry’s car manufacturing business prospered, so key suppliers were drawn to the city and the surrounding West Midlands, already Britain’s industrial heartland.

Coventry would go on to prosper. Lawson would go to jail. His efforts to monopolise UK car making quickly turned ugly, and in 1904 he was sentenced to 12 months hard labour for fraudulently obtaining money from shareholders.

The Daimler UK rights were passed on to BSA – the Birmingham-based firearms, bicycle, motorbike and car maker – before Jaguar Cars bought them in 1960. From 1968-92, the Daimler badge was used on upscale Jaguars which, incongruously, targeted top-end Mercedes cars made by Daimler-Benz.

Jaguar would later become Coventry’s most famous and longest-lived car manufacturer. But many others would emerge before a young William Lyons moved his budding Swallow Sidecars operation and his home from Blackpool to the West Midlands in 1928. More than 125 car makers would start up in Coventry. In 1945 this included Lyons’ new Jaguar Cars, formerly SS Cars – not a popular set of initials in post-war Britain.

Among the many Coventry cycle makers who transitioned from two wheels to four, the most eminent was Rover. Its ‘safety’ bicycle of 1885 – so called because other types of cycles, including Penny Farthings, were anything but ‘safe’ – revolutionised road transport and society.

It used a diamond-shaped frame and wheels of roughly the same size. A chain linked a cogged wheel next to the pedals to another cogged wheel driving the rear hub. The modern bicycle was born: stronger, lighter, faster and simpler than anything before. Although the bicycle has evolved mightily, it is still recognisably the same machine first designed by John Kemp Starley and built in his workshops in Coventry.

The first four-wheeled Rover car appeared in 1904.

Triumph, another famous Coventry cycle maker, moved into motorcycles in 1902, and into cars in 1923. Riley graduated from bicycles to motor trikes, before moving onto four wheels.

Singer, a Coventry bicycle maker since 1874, began car making in 1905. Its most famous apprentice was William (Billy) Rootes, whose subsequent motor group would buy the brand. He was later knighted, partly for his role in the reconstruction of Coventry after the Luftwaffe’s saturation bombing.

Rootes would also buy Coventry-based Hillman – which began car making in 1907 – and Coventry’s Humber, which had been part of Lawson’s car making syndicate.

As regular readers of this Motor Cities series may remember, when the war ended, Rootes rejected the chance to take over Volkswagen, sited in the British quarter of post-war Germany. He described the new Beetle as ’too ugly and noisy’. And of the Wolfsburg factory, he advised the senior resident British officer: ‘If you’re thinking of building cars in this place, you’re a bloody fool.’

If Rootes had thought differently, Volkswagen might have become a Coventry car maker.

Other famous Coventry car companies included Lanchester, whose founder Dr Frederick W Lanchester worked for Harry J Lawson.  Lanchester later became part of Daimler, and in turn was bought by Jaguar.

The Coventry rollcall continues and also includes Lea Francis, another cycle-cum-car maker, Armstrong Siddeley and Alvis, eventually taken over by Rover in 1967. There’s also Standard ‘specially designed for the owner-driver’ which produced its first car in 1903 and bought Triumph after the war. A Coventry city centre pub, The Standard, still honours the old marque.

Coventry car production peaked in the 1950s, and stayed strong until the early 1970s. The decline thereafter was swift, and not just in Coventry. As brands were merged under state-controlled British Leyland and its antecedents, so many famous Coventry names were culled. Those brands that did survive were frequently enfeebled by cynical badge engineering, and increasingly poor quality. Widespread industrial unrest forced managers to concentrate on placating union bosses, rather than producing good cars. Investment lagged, production plunged.

UK car buyers, never a particularly patriotic bunch, happily turned to cars made by Ford, GM and the frequently superior German and (later) Japanese alternatives. Margaret Thatcher’s vision for a post-industrial Britain certainly did the UK’s indigenous car makers no favours, though she did persuade Nissan to set up shop in Britain, far to the north of Coventry in Sunderland, where the costs were lower and the single trade union far less adversarial. It would give the UK supplier base a significant boost, and help persuade Honda and Toyota to make cars in Britain, too.

By the mid 1980s, only two sizable Coventry car plants survived: Jaguar in Browns Lane and Peugeot, building cars in Rootes’ old Ryton factory, former home of Hillman, Humber, Sunbeam and Talbot.

Browns Lane is now a Taylor Wimpey housing estate and an Amazon receiving centre. Peugeot’s old Ryton home is now a rail distribution centre and, in an unusual twist, home to JLR’s Classics division, where fine old Jaguars and Land Rovers are restored and occasionally even built new from scratch.

Rover, one of Coventry’s pre-eminent pre-war brands, moved 25 miles west to Solihull just after the war. It soon launched the world’s first production civilian 4×4 and the resulting Land Rover would become more successful than any Rover. Now, Land Rover and its posher sibling Range Rover are all that’s left of Rover and are now, incongruously, the backbone of Britain’s most successful and important car maker, JLR – whose registered head office remains in Coventry.

And what of the J in JLR? Jaguar is the only famous Coventry car nameplate still alive today. Although even Jaguar is in hibernation, as we await its radical new electric four-door GT, to be built in Solihull and due to be unveiled in production form later this year.

The only significant car manufacturing today done in Coventry are the electric taxis made by LEVC in its new factory in Ansty Park, just north-east of the city. Now owned by China’s Geely, the company was formerly sited in Holyhead Road, Coventry where, as Carbodies, it produced bodies for Jaguar, MG, Triumph and others.

So, in many ways, Britain’s ‘Detroit’ has seen the same sad decline as its US car capital equivalent. Yet, like Detroit, there are happy signs of a high-tech resurgence.

From the proposed battery gigafactory in Greenpower Park – to be built on the site of Coventry’s soon-to-close airport – to the world’s first ‘vertiport’, a transport hub for air taxis and drones, sited in a car park beside the Coventry ring road. From new electric motorcycle maker Maeving to innovative driverless pod manufacturer RDM, now part of Aurrigo, whose factory is on Humber Road, former site of the eponymous car maker. Then there’s the new Coventry Very Light Rail system, a lightweight tram network partly developed by the Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG), the research centre headquartered at the University of Warwick, located on the outskirts of Coventry despite its name.

The university is also home to the National Automotive Innovation Centre (NAIC), a partnership between JLR, Tata and the WMG, and one of the biggest auto research facilities in Europe, working on new generation powertrains and autonomous driving, among other tomorrow’s world tech.

Nearby Coventry University has one of the best automotive and motorsport engineering courses in the world, including strong ties to JLR, Lotus and nearby Prodrive. Its car design course goes back 50 years, and alumni include Ti’s Ian Callum, JLR’s Gerry McGovern and Bentley design boss Robin Page.

Coventry may never be the UK car making capital again. But it will surely stay a major centre of car and transport creativity.

And if you just want to celebrate Coventry’s past, and not contemplate the future, there’s the perfect stopover. The Coventry Transport Museum has the world’s largest publicly owned collection of British cars.

Standout displays include an original Rover safety cycle and one of the first cars built in the UK, an 1898 Daimler Wagonette. You can see Thrust SSC, as driven by Andy Green to 763mph in 1997 on Black Rock Desert, Nevada. And perhaps my favourite exhibit, the 500cc Triumph Tiger 100 motorcycle ridden 64,000 miles around the world through 45 countries by Ted Simon, author of the wonderful Jupiter’s Travels. That trip inspired me to travel, and more famously it inspired Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman to ride the ‘long way around’, eastwards from London to New York.

Jupiter, or the ‘Transworld Trumpet’, is in the same condition in which it finished its journey in 1978. Ted personally rode it to the museum to donate it.